How do I prevent Frontier from hijacking my DNS requests?

If you're a fiber-optic service subscriber with Frontier, along with your regular broadband service, you also get free DNS hijacking. What does that even mean?

How do I prevent Frontier from hijacking my DNS requests?

If you're a fiber-optic service subscriber with Frontier, along with your regular broadband service, you also get free DNS hijacking. What does that even mean?

By default, if you look for a non-existant website like: https://omg.frontier.is.so.awesome.i.want.to.marry.it/

What you SHOULD see, is something similar to this (taken from the Mozilla Firefox browser):

Mozilla Firefox - Standard Domain Not Found Message

But what you get by default with Frontier is non-standard behavior. Instead of telling you that the domain doesn't exist, they send you to their own search page: the "Frontier Communications Web Helper" which looks like this:

Frontier - Hijacked DNS - Domain Not Found Message

I see absolutely no reason to give the fine folks at Frontier any additional meta-data or ad revenue. Additionally, as a professional software engineer, I like things to behave the way they're supposed to.

I wanted to turn this off immediately. Fortunately, it's pretty easy to disable!

In the top-right area of the page, you should see a "Settings" link. Click it.

Frontier Communications Web Helper Settings Link

You should now see an option for "Search Guide Settings". It should currently be set to "On".

Frontier Communications Web Helper - Preferences - Search Guide Settings - On

Click "Off" and click the "Save" button.

Frontier Communications Web Helper - Preferences - Search Guide Settings - Off

!! DON'T FORGET TO CLICK THE "Save" BUTTON !!

Now your searches for non-existent sites and domains should behave normally.